Miho Museum

Listen first. Up here in the Shigaraki hills, the loudest sound is often the wind moving through cedar and pine. The air is cooler than in the valley below. The light falls green and soft through the trees. You have come a long way on narrow mountain roads to reach this place, and that long journey was part of the plan from the very beginning.

The Miho Museum opened in 1997. It sits in the forested mountains of Shiga Prefecture, east of Kyoto, within the city of Kōka. The museum was founded by Mihoko Koyama, a wealthy collector and the founder of a spiritual movement called Shinji Shumeikai. Her name gives the museum its name. She wanted a home for her collection that felt like a destination, not a gallery on a city street.

To design it, she chose I. M. Pei, the Chinese-American architect best known for the glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris. Pei took his idea from an old Chinese story called Peach Blossom Spring, written by the poet Tao Yuanming. In the tale, a fisherman follows a stream through a grove of blossoming peach trees. He finds a narrow opening in a mountain, passes through it, and discovers a hidden, peaceful valley. Keep that story in mind. You are about to walk through it.

Your visit begins at the reception pavilion. From there, a path leads uphill, lined with weeping cherry trees. In spring, these trees fill with pale pink blossom, and the walk becomes a slow tunnel of petals. In other seasons, the branches hang bare or green. Either way, the path is meant to slow you down. You can walk it, or ride a small, quiet electric shuttle if you prefer.

Then comes the tunnel. It curves gently, so at first you cannot see the end. The walls are lined with metal panels that catch the light and throw it softly back at you. As you walk, a bright opening appears ahead. This is the fisherman's passage through the mountain. Many visitors stop here without thinking about it, just to take a photograph of that glowing circle of daylight.

You step out onto a bridge. It crosses a deep, wooded valley, held up by steel cables that fan out from a tall arch above. Pei designed the bridge to feel light, almost floating over the treetops. Look across it now. At the far end, framed by the forest, you can see the museum's entrance. It looks less like a building and more like a temple roof resting in the hills.

Here is something many visitors miss. Most of the museum is underground. The site lies in a protected natural area, and the rules limited how much building could rise above the ground. So Pei placed much of the museum inside the mountain. Large parts of the hillside were dug out, and then the earth and trees were put back on top. What you see from the bridge is only a small part of the whole.

Inside, the first thing you notice is light. The roof is a frame of steel and glass, with screens beneath it that soften the sunshine. The walls and floors are made of a warm, pale limestone brought from France. The colour is close to honey or sand. When clouds pass over, the whole entrance hall grows darker, then brighter again. The building changes with the weather outside.

Look out through the large windows of the entrance hall. You will see a view of the mountains and the bare branches or green crowns of the pines. Pei borrowed an old idea from Japanese garden design here, sometimes called borrowed scenery. A borrowed scenery view uses the landscape beyond the walls as part of the design. The forest is not just behind the museum. It is meant to be part of what you came to see.

The museum has two main wings. One holds Japanese art, including tea ceremony objects, ceramics, calligraphy, and Buddhist sculpture. The other holds art from the ancient world beyond Japan. There you may find works from Egypt, Western Asia, Greece, Rome, South Asia, and China. The galleries rotate their displays, and special exhibitions change through the year. So what you see today may not be what the next visitor sees.

A second surprise is how the collection was built. Mihoko Koyama and her daughter gathered most of these objects in the years just before the museum opened, buying from dealers and auctions around the world. That speed drew attention. Over the years, questions have been raised about where a small number of the ancient pieces came from. It is a reminder that every object in a museum has travelled a long and sometimes complicated road to reach its glass case.

As you move through the galleries, notice how calm they feel. The rooms are quiet, the lighting is low, and many objects stand alone with space around them. You are encouraged to look slowly. Pei once said that he wanted visitors to arrive at this museum feeling they had left ordinary life behind. The long approach, the tunnel, the bridge, and the hush inside all work toward that one feeling.

The town of Shigaraki below is famous for something quite different. For centuries, potters here have made rough, earthy stoneware from the local clay, with warm orange and brown colours. You may have seen the cheerful ceramic raccoon dog figures, called tanuki, standing outside shops in the area. They are a symbol of Shigaraki pottery. If you have time after the museum, the potteries in the valley make a good contrast to these quiet galleries.

Before you leave, step back outside and stand for a moment near the entrance. Look back toward the bridge and the dark mouth of the tunnel. Listen again to the wind in the trees. When you walk back across, the story runs in reverse. The fisherman leaves the hidden valley and returns to the ordinary world. Take the walk slowly. Notice the light at the end of the tunnel... and what changes in you as you reach it.